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The Xen section took a particularly long time to finish, and now that I've played it it's easy to see why: Crowbar Collective took that part of Half-Life, largely considered its weakest act, more or less put the entire thing in the garbage, and started over from scratch. Different parts of it have been playable for years, but last week Black Mesa's developer Crowbar Collective started beta testing the 1.0 release of the game, meaning the entire thing is playable, beginning to end, including the game's last chapter, Xen, which takes place on an alien world. It's not just a bunch of high resolution textures, but a meticulous recreation of a long, complex, and beloved game in a more recent engine, with a few embellishments.īlack Mesa's ambitions were so exciting when I first saw a trailer for it in the 2000s that I decided I wouldn't play it until the entire thing was finished. It's more like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho than the cleaned-up and 'digitally remastered' release of Star Wars.

It recreates the entirety of Half-Life in Half-Life 2's Source engine. But the scope of Black Mesa would have been an undertaking for any team. This is comparing apples and oranges a bit since there's a big difference between working in a well-funded, dedicated development team and a team of initially unpaid fans who are chipping away at a dream project while working day jobs. That's 16 years of development for a remake of a game that took only two years to develop. It's been in development in one form or another since shortly after the release of Half Life 2 in 2004.

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The new suddenly stands out like a sore thumb, forcing me to recognize the difference between Black Mesa's hobbyist origins and Half-Life's now canonical, genre-defining level design.īlack Mesa's frequent overextensions don't detract from it as one of the most ambitious mods in the history of video games. When it fails like this, Black Mesa brings the whole audacious experiment crashing down. But too often, like the battle at the missile silo, Black Mesa's additions bite off more than they can chew, adding too many enemies, new art assets, and dramatic music in an attempt to turn what was once a simple, memorable room or beat into an action set piece.

New or overhauled spaces are woven seamlessly into the original, and capture its spirit of sci-fi, corporate dread so perfectly, I had to check videos of Half-Life on YouTube to check if they were actually new. Some of them are so subtle, they're hard to notice.

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In the original Half-Life, I could end this fight with one well placed grenade, but here, in the lovingly crafted fan-made remake called Black Mesa, it is a long and drawn-out fight, where I scramble from cover to cover, reload, and pick off not-so-clever enemies until the path is clear.īlack Mesa is full of these embellishments on the original Half-Life. What was once a simple rectangular space with a missile silo lid at its center is now a sprawling arena filled with boxes, military equipment, and soldiers running around shooting me.

This brand new compilation of remastered ports is missing custom resolutions, ultra-widescreen support, FOV fixes, features lower quality audio, and much more.I turn the corner, as I have many times before, but I don't find what I expect. It's safe to say that the Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Volume 1 was disappointing, lacking further enhancements compared to the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection released by Bluepoint Games in 2011.

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